Google cuts jobs, axes services

Across a series of blog entries posted Wednesday, Google announced it will layoff about 100 employees as well as terminate a handful of web and mobile services, including mobile social networking effort Dodgeball. "As we made clear during our last quarterly earnings call in October, Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate," writes Google's vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock on the Official Google Blog. "Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring. Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions."

In addition to shutting down web services including Google Notebooks, Google Catalogs and Google Mashup Editor, the firm also announced it will no longer support Dodgeball, which it acquired in May 2005. Two years later, co-founders Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert announced their resignations from Google: "It's no real secret that Google wasn't supporting Dodgeball the way we expected," Crowley posted in a blog entry following the announcement. "The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us--especially as we couldn't convince them that Dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space." On the Google Code Blog, vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra writes the company will discontinue Dodgeball within the next couple of months, with a more specific timetable to follow.

Gundotra also announced plans to shutter development efforts in support of microblogging service Jaiku, acquired in late 2007, although the service will remain online. "As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine," Gundotra writes. "After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers."

For more on the Google announcements:
- read this TechCrunch article